Jesus’ face on a Walmart receipt? People see what they want to see

By David McElroy · July 18, 2011

If Jesus wanted to reveal Himself to you, how do you suppose He’d do it? A South Carolina couple is convinced that Jesus is blessing them by mysteriously superimposing His fuzzy image onto a Walmart receipt. If this is the best Jesus can do, the photographic equipment at the right hand of the Father leaves a bit to be desired.

It’s easy to make fun of people such as this — and I’m not discouraging that in this case — but there’s a more interesting point to be made. Most of the time, people see what they want (or need) to see. It’s a well-known phenomenon, although it goes by different names. (This article by Michael Shermer is a good overview of the science behind it, although I have to caution that I think Shermer has a history of being too quick to dismiss everything he can’t explain.)

I’ve seen this in my own life when somebody saw Jesus’ face in a door at a local hospital. (More about that in a moment.)

This tendency to find simplistic explanations for random events affects most people. When folks just see Jesus on their Walmart receipt, it’s not a big deal. But what about cases in which people start seeing irrational things in economics (“Imports are bad!”) and then insist that society be reordered to fit their prejudices? It can lead to the idiocy of the modern state’s economic policies. What about when people see conspiracies by racial or ethnic groups (“The Jews are out to get us!”) and start trying to destroy those people? It can lead to Nazi death camps.

When I was working at my very first newspaper job — at the Daily Mountain Eagle in Jasper, Ala. — there was a big story when some people were claiming that they saw Jesus’ face in the wood grain of a door at the local hospital. I’d never heard of such a thing at the time, so I was eager to see it. When I finally got to see the door, I saw, well, nothing but wood grain. There was absolutely nothing of interest there. But some family member of someone in the hospital at the time had a great emotional need and saw something in the door that was comforting to him. For those who chose to believe it — for whatever their unconscious reasons — nothing could shake what they believed they saw.

When it comes to the case in South Carolina, I’d ask several questions:

What makes the couple believe this face is Jesus? It certainly looks quite a bit like a guy with a beard, but why Jesus? Why not a random brick mason from Romania instead? How would you know what Jesus looked like on Earth? And if Jesus had taken the trouble to reveal Himself to you, don’t you suppose He would make it clear what He meant?
Since we know that these thermal receipts are affected by heat, isn’t it more likely that some kind of image has been pressed on top of it in the summer heat? Wouldn’t you think that the receipt might have been pressed up against a hot Sunday school book with that image (or something like that) — and then the heat transferred the image? (That’s random speculation. There are dozens of possibilities.)
Why do people let “news” organizations get away with this garbage? I understand why the TV people do it. They do it because you watch. But why do people who watch it not call the station and say, “This isn’t news. Quit filling my time with banal junk.” (Read Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” for an excellent look at why TV isn’t capable of doing serious news and will always eventually default to banalities such as this.)

I don’t have a clue what caused the image on the face on that Walmart receipt, but I’m confident that it’s not a message from Jesus. For me, it’s just a reminder that the people around us — including ourselves more often than we’d like to admit — are going to see things that aren’t really there and judge the world in irrational ways.

Remember that the next time you find yourself thinking that “the will of the people” is a good way to dictate how everybody has to live.

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I’ve never been attracted to skinny women. There’s nothing wrong with someone who’s naturally thin, but it’s never been my preference. What has shocked me, though, is the judgment I’ve heard from women all through my life — about themselves and others — about who’s “fat.” I concluded long ago that most women in our culture have been brainwashed to believe that skinny is attractive — and that anything other than skinny is ugly. I first assumed that I was the oddball — for preferring women with bigger and heavier bodies — but I’m coming to the conclusion that most men naturally feel this way to one extent or another. I just ran across new research by a couple of Northwestern University psychology professors that shows that women seriously overestimate how much a straight man will be attracted to a skinny woman. In a perfect world, we would all be at a healthy weight, but when it comes to attractiveness, too heavy is more attractive than skinny. At least to me — and to a lot of men, too.

Years ago, I heard a question that seemed very insightful at the time. You’ve probably heard it, too. What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? The question is intended to help you uncover things you really want to do, but which you’re afraid to try — for fear of failure. In an interview today, I heard the great marketing guru Seth Godin give a different point of view. He said the better question is to ask what you would do even if you knew it would fail. That struck me as far more insightful than the original version. We ought to be doing what we know is right, not what will maximize our success or praise from others. There are some battles that are worth fighting even if you believe you’re doomed to failure. Those battles are often for love or important ideas or our children. Some things are simply worth fighting for — and the truth is that you might win anyway. Do the right thing. Take the chance.

The more I understand about myself, about human nature and about the nature of reality, the more I realize I’m a radical by the standards of both Modernism and Postmodernism. Seeing the things which I’m stumbling toward makes me an enemy of many of the core ideas upon which contemporary culture is built. It exposes the culture as a monstrous lie — like a dangerous infection that’s slowly destroying what human were created to be. My “inner observer” has always known that truth was found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, but I’m slowly finding words to explain what has merely been instinct until now. The Enlightenment was humanity’s great leap forward, but shallow and arrogant thinkers for the next two centuries threw away the fruits of that achievement. We can’t go forward as a species until we go back to correct this intellectual and spiritual error — and part of that is acknowledging that our collective attempts to do away with our Creator will always fail.

I’ve come to believe that some of us — including me — aren’t very good at knowing how to be happy. I don’t mean that in the sense that happy talk and positive thinking should be able to make us happy regardless of the circumstances. I mean that some of us had so much experience with being unhappy when we were young that we were trained to be unhappy — and that being happy is an unconsciously uncomfortable thing. When I look at times in my past when I should have been happy, it rarely lasted. I believe now that I found reasons to be unhappy — and caused real problems for myself — because being comfortable and happy felt so foreign to my programming. If I’m right, this means that some of us have to do more than just change our circumstances. It means we have to learn how to accept the happiness that we unconsciously fear we don’t deserve.

After I wrote last night about being happy, I thought of an old song that mirrored what I was feeling. After listening to the entire album, I found it remarkable how well the emotions of that music match my own heart at this point in my life. Bob Bennett’s “Matters of the Heart” came out while I was in college. Even after all these years, it holds up really well, and you can listen to the entire album on YouTube. The specific song which matched my feelings last night was “Madness Dancing,” but I still find every song on the album to be strong with the exception of the eighth and ninth. (The song about his parents, called “1951,” is especially poignant.) In fact, the opening and closing songs paint a picture of my heart at its best now in these lines: “A light shining in this heart of darkness, A new beginning and a miracle, Day by day the integration of the concrete and the spiritual.” It’s old music that you’ve probably never heard, but it means a lot to me.

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